The document provides information about African American literary criticism, including key concepts, perspectives, and questions asked by African American critics when analyzing literary texts. Some of the main points covered include: - African American criticism examines how race, oppression, and marginalization shape black writing and experience in America. - Key concepts in African American literature introduced by W.E.B. DuBois like "the veil" and "double consciousness" are discussed. - African American criticism is concerned with how texts participate in correcting stereotypes and misrepresentations while also celebrating black culture. - Questions around literary devices, racial politics, and how works fit into the African American literary tradition are important to African American criticism.

1. +
ELIT 48C Class # 23
Complement
versus
Compliment
Great
Sweater! It
looks good
with those
jeans!
Thanks!
I just
bought
it!

2. +
Grammar Slide
 Complement is a noun or verb that means
something that completes or makes up a whole:
“The red sweater is a perfect complement to the
outfit.”
 Compliment is a noun or verb that means an
expression of praise or admiration: “I received
compliments about my new red sweater.”
 Easily Confused or Misused Words | Infoplease.com
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0200807.html#ixzz2T7S5NSIg

3. +
AGENDA
Chair poetry
African American (Minority) Criticism
Lecture
Discussion
Friday: The Great Gatsby
11:00 am at the AMC Cupertino square 16.

4. +
Chair Poet of the Day?
Prose: words in
their best order;
poetry: the best
words in the best
order.
- S. T. Coleridge

5. +
Toni Morrison: American novelist, American
literary critic, editor, and professor.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. : American literary critic,
educator, scholar, writer, editor, and public
intellectual
African
American
Criticism

6. +The following perspectives help identify
African-American criticism
African American criticism notes that black writing
comes out of a sociological, political, ideological, and
cultural situation marked by oppression and
marginalization. “Black” reading then must negotiate
the difficult boundaries between textual and cultural
meanings.
 Black criticism has substantial ties to post-colonial
criticism, and to the issues in it of the representation of the
'other” and the reclamation of identity in the forms and
language of the oppressor.

7. +
African American criticism has an awareness
that black experience has ties to African
language, cultural practices, and attitudes, that
it is formed through the experience of slavery
and violence, that it has endured a long and
troubled negotiation with white culture, so that
black artistic production in white cultures is
marked by white culture positively and
negatively.

8.  African American criticism is a struggle over
the relation of race, reading, and critical theory,
similar in some respects to that of feminist
theory:
 Who “speaks for” blacks?
 Can only blacks “read” black literature?
 Can black literature be read with the tools of
contemporary criticism, or does it demand a
more basic, moral and ideological
commitment?

9. African American criticism examines how white writing in
racist countries reveals the nature of the oppression of
blacks.
Toni Morrison, for instance, argues that American culture
is built on, and always includes, the presence of blacks, as
slaves, as outsiders. Morrison likens the unwillingness of
academics in a racist society to see the place of
Africanism in literature and culture to the centuries of
unwillingness to see feminine discourse, concerns, and
identity.
She posits whiteness as the “other” of blackness, a
dialectical pair (each term both creates and excludes the
other): no freedom without slavery, no white without black.

10.  African American criticism is also an attempt to come to terms
with the whole issue of what “race” is.
 Historically race has been seen as something essential. That race is
inherent, a matter of 'blood', was and is firmly believed by
Americans, is clear from the recent autobiography of an American,
Gregory Howard Williams, now Dean of the Law School at Ohio
State, Life on the Color Line, a man who looks white, and whose
father passed as Italian in Virginia, where his family was not known.
He was, in Virginia, accepted and treated as white, but he was
treated as black (and hence was the victim of exclusion and other
prejudicial behavior) when the family returned to their home town of
Muncie, Indiana: there they knew that his grandmother was black;
therefore, he was black.
 When is white black?-- When you have some “black blood”? Or
when people know or think you have black blood?

11.  As a subject matter, any analysis of a literary work written by
an African American, regardless of the theoretical framework
used, might be called African American criticism, even if no
attention is paid to elements in the text that are specifically
African American.
 However, as a theoretical framework [. . .] African American
criticism foregrounds race (racial identity, African American
cultural traditions, psychology, politics, and so forth) as the
object of analysis because race, in America, informs our
individual and cultural psychology, and therefore our literature,
in profound ways. As a theoretical framework, then, African
American criticism can be used to analyze any literary
text that speaks to African American issues, regardless of
the race of its author, although the work of African American
writers is the primary focus (Tyson 394).

12. +
Important Terms
 In The Souls of Black Folk, arguably W.E.B. DuBois‟s most
famous work, he introduces and addresses two concepts that
describe the quintessential Black experience in America. The
first is the concept of “the veil. ”
 The veil concept primarily refers to three conditions of racial
difference:
 The literal darker skin of Blacks, which is a physical demarcation
of difference from whiteness.
 White people‟s lack of clarity to see Blacks as “true” Americans.
 Blacks‟ lack of clarity to see themselves outside of what white
America describes and prescribes for them.

13. +
Important Terms
 The second concept that Debois introduces is “double-
consciousness.” This concept is inextricably intertwined with “the veil.”
The veil dampens the view of both Blacks and Whites, yet
Blacks traditionally have a better understanding of whites than
the reverse because of the “two-ness” lived by Black Americans.
Understanding being Black and what that has historically meant
(or means) in America, Black people know they operate in two
Americas— one that is White and one that is Black. This is the
phenomena of “double-consciousness,” the awareness of the
“two-ness” of being both American and African American and
the largely unconscious and instinctive shifts between the these
two identities.

14. +
Some questions African American
critics ask about literary texts
1. What can the work teach us about the specifics of African heritage,
African American culture and experience, and/or African American
history?
2. What are the racial politics (ideological agendas related to racial
oppression or liberation) of specific African American works?
 Does the work correct stereotypes of African Americans?
 Does it correct historical misrepresentations of African Americans?
 Does it celebrate African American culture, experience, and
achievement?
 Does it explore racial issues, including, among others, the economic,
social, or psychological effects of racism?
 Or, does it, as can be seen in the literary production of many white
authors, does the work reinforce racist ideologies?

15. +
3. What are the poetics (literary devices and strategies) of
specific African American works?
 Does the work use black vernacular or standard white English?
 Does the work draw on African myths or African American
folktales or folk motifs?
 Does the work provide imagery that resonates with African
American women’s domestic space, African American cultural
practices, history, or heritage?
 What are the effects of these literary devices, and how do they
relate to the theme, or meaning, of the work?

16. +
4. How does the work participate in the African American
literary tradition? In short, what place does it occupy in African
American literary history or in African American women’s
literary history?
5. How does the work illustrate interest convergences, the
social construction of race, white privilege, or any other
concept from critical race theory? How can an understanding
of these concepts deepen our interpretation of the work?
6. How is an Africanist presence—black characters, stories
about black people, representations of black speech, images
associated with Africa or with blackness—used in works by
white writers to construct positive portrayals of white
characters?

17. +
Discussion
African
American
Criticism
Gwendolyn
Brooks: An
American Poet
1917-2000
Ralph Ellison
American
novelist, literary
critic, scholar and
writer
1913-1994

18. +
QHQ: African American Criticism
 Why is it relevant to talk about African American Criticism?
 Does it limit African-American artists to say that racial and/or political
statements are more important than entertainment, “art for art‟s
sake,” or another motivation?
 Why would black writers feel the need to write in proper English
rather than their own language [vernacular]?
 Why was it important for black writers to have a double
consciousness?
 Why are people of color, according to the African American criticism,
sometimes considered oversensitive when offended by issues that
are considered racist by them?
 How does reading African American criticism help broaden our views
of how literature has been affected by the social structures of race?

19. +
For Discussion
 I wanted to discuss the idea of intra-racial racism. This is
something I have never heard in any other criticism or book
before. However, it is something that I have seen in real life.
This concept is not subjective to only African Americans, in fact
in many races there are individuals who feel that they superior
to others of their same race. This, in my opinion, destroys the
sense of unity that is needed in order to stop oppression.
 Does intra-racial racism attribute to the double consciousness?

20. +
Consider one of our previous texts through
the lens of African American Criticism.

21. +
The Great Gatsby
 In chapter four, Gatsby takes Nick in hurtling in his car towards
Manhattan with “fenders spread like wings” to witness the power his
money has bought him. In less than a page, the narrator Nick makes
several pejorative comments that address aspects of race and ethnicity,
noting friends of a dead man who had “…the tragic eyes and short upper
lips of southeastern Europe,” as well as introducing us to Gatsby‟s
colleague, Mr. Wofsheim, who he describes as a “small, flat-nosed Jew.”
Tom and Daisy are never described in terms like these, the presumption
being that being white and Protestant is normal and not worth mentioning;
any deviation is potentially suspect and worth keeping a close eye on. In
this passage, Nick notices something he finds extraordinary: “As we
crossed Blackwell‟s Island, a limousine passed us, driven by a white
chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl. I
laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty
rivalry. „Anything can happen now that we‟ve slid over this bridge,‟ I
thought; „anything at all…‟” This is incredibly disturbing! Is the narrator as
racist as this passage would lead one to believe? Is the narrator
expressing sentiments that Fitzgerald espoused?

22. +
The Great Gatsby
 There is a scene in the book in the beginning when Tom is
reading a book called “The Rise of the Colored Empires” by a
man named “Goddard.” Tom tells Nick that “civilization‟s going
to pieces” and that it is “scientifically proven.” I think this is a
form of institutionalized racism, since this book that Tom is
reading seems to have made it into the canon and the fact that
it is “scientifically proven” seems like the dominant race in
America, the whites, are trying really hard to keep the black
people in place.

23. +
My Ántonia
 Applying African-American Criticism to My Antonia, one can see
d‟ Arnault falls very cleanly into one of the many “character
types” that are mentioned in the book on criticism: “the local
healer, the conjurer, the matriarch, the local storyteller, the
trickster, the religious leader, and the folk hero” (386). Samson
D‟ Arnault clearly is the folk hero. In My Antonia, when he plays
piano, he is described as “some glistening African god of
pleasure, full of strong, savage blood” (118). He is the folk hero
who is prodigiously talented at playing piano. (“He was always a
negro prodigy who played barbarously and wonderfully” (117).)
This exotic image of d‟ Arnault as foreign and fascinating is akin
to the African-American version of Orientalism. Also, since d‟
Arnault is not recently from Africa, this image of being an African
god suggests the piece of African-American criticism that
hearkens back to Africa itself.

24. +
“I, Too”
 [I want to] take a psychoanalytic approach along with the minority lens.
The text for homework discussing the criticism brought up some
interesting points, in black history as well as the present state of the
continued racial injustices of today along with the internalized oppression.
The poem “I, too” does not display internalized oppression but rather the
opposite, and a mindset that differs others from the idea that they are
truly inferior to the white race. The speaker says, “Tomorrow…/they will
see how beautiful we are/and be ashamed” showing confidence and
having a subtle implication that others should feel the same way. Even
though this poem is modern there still seems to be a bit of forceful
suggestion about how blacks should feel about themselves in the
oppressive society in which they live and always look toward tomorrow
instead of focusing on the norms of their day that degrade them; and to
not allow the pressures of the oppressive world intrude into their psyche.
This poem clearly opposes the residency of internalized oppression within
the black mind by suggesting that the white race someday will see their
beauty and realize their awesome significance and strength as a people
and community.

25. +
HOMEWORK
Post #23: Briefly consider one of our
previous texts through one critical lens:
New Criticism, Feminism, Marxism, or
African American Criticism. Focus on a
particular passage.
Familiarize yourself with potential
topics for essay #1